Very Much Timely, Very Much Not

The hottest new thing in the gaming zeitgeist at the moment is Fortnite Battle Royale. Epic announced Fortnite what must have been 5 or 7 years ago, and it languished in development hell for ages until Player Unknown's Battlegrounds found huge success last year, when Fortnite quickly bit off that same idea and recreated it within their game. It's been a massive success. They even got me to give it a shot, which is nothing short of miraculous, being that I had to download Epic's own separate game client to give it a shot.

In short, I think Fortnite Battle Royale is a pretty solid and fun multiplayer game mode. It's a very good fit for me, particularly because of the solo mode where the game is everyone-for-themself. That said, there's a lot of downtime in the game as I have played it thus far. I have been electing to drop into various areas around the map, usually away from others, in order to scrounge materials and an arsenal before making my way to wherever the shrinking circle is. I'm usually careful to keep a low profile until I have seen someone I can get the drop on. This means a lot of running behind cover and scouting out a location before venturing in. Sometimes a match can be 10 or 15 minutes of this before ending in just few short seconds of a firefight, or being sniped from afar with no warning whatsoever.
It's been fun to play some, and I'll keep dipping in for now, but it's hard to say how long it might hold my attention. I've made it into the top 10 a few times, as high as 5th place once.

I wanted to knock a game off of my backlog, and I was up to Q in the rotation, so I went with Quake Mission Pack 1: Scourge of Armagon. I'm on to the third level now, I believe. I keep hopping back and forth between this, the main game, and DOPA, the mission pack Machine Games put out a couple of years ago to celebrate Quake's 20th anniversary. I absolutely love Quake. These new missions feel pretty good for the most part, as well. They have added some environmental puzzles and elements to the game, and a few new weapons and enemies as well. I don't really have much of anything to complain about with what I have seen. Quake is great, and more of it is always a good thing, as far as I can tell. At some point maybe I'll get around to playing other games in the weird series.

I have also continued to make some progress through Tactics Ogre. I have taken Denam and his band up to chapter 4 in the campaign now. It appears he and his sister Catiua are secretly the heirs to some title somewhere or something. I don't quite follow the story, but then this campaign has been in progress since around 2010. My plan from here is to go find the next story mission and then grind if need be to finish it. Once my characters are closer to level 20, I can go to the pirate island in the southwest to do the optional mission there.